30 Years Among The Dead

In offering this volume to the public, there is no desire to promulgate any ism or cult, but to present the records and deductions of thirty years experimental research in the science of normal and abnormal psychology, as the same pertains to the obscure problems of a life hereafter and its relation to human affairs, which all thinking minds must recognize as being of utmost importance. – From the Introduction

Thirty Years Among the Dead, first published in 1924, details Swedish-American GP and psychiatrist Carl Wickland’s experiences as a psychical researcher. After moving to California in 1918, Wickland began to turn away from conventional medical psychology and moved toward the belief that psychiatric illnesses were the result of influence by spirits of the dead. He came to believe that a large number of his patients had become possessed by what he called "obsessing spirits", and that low-voltage electric shocks could dislodge them. His wife Anna acted as a medium to guide them to "progress in the spirit world". Spiritualists considered him an authority on "destructive spirits", prompting Wickland to write this book.

2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FICTION FINALIST Set in rural Oklahoma during the late 1980s, Where the Dead Sit Talking is a stunning and lyrical Native American coming-of-age story. With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his mother’s years of substance abuse, Sequoyah keeps mostly to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface. At least until he meets seventeen-year-old Rosemary, a troubled artist who also lives with the family. Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American background and tumultuous paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah’s feelings toward Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both.

Michelle Williams is young and attractive, she has close family ties as well as a busy social life - but she is far from usual. She is a mortuary technician and her job involves dealing with those things in life that many people do not wish to experience directly. Yet life in the mortuary is neither gruesome nor sad. Told with good humour and common sense, we are introduced to a host of characters - the pathologists, many of them eccentric, some downright mad; the undertakers, the hospital porters and the man from the coroner's office who sings to Michelle every morning. The incidents too ensure that no two days are ever the same. From the tragic to the hilarious they include: The fitness fanatic who was run over as he did pressups in the road on a dark night The decapitated motorcyclist The guide dog who led his owner on to the railway tracks - and left him there The forty stone man for whom an entire refrigerated lorry had to be hired because he wouldn't fit in the mortuary cooler Over the course of her first year Michelle has to deal with situations and emotions that few of us will ever experience, and does so while retaining a sense of humour and a sense of perspective.

An FBI agent, rotting away in a high-security prison for a murder he did not commit... His brilliant, psychotic brother, about to perpetrate a horrific crime... A young woman with an extrodinary past, on th edge of a violent breakdown... An ancient Egyptian tomb with an enigmatic curse, about to be unveiled at a celebrity-studded New York gala... Memento Mori